


Jitters

by Transistance



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Alcohol, Body Dysphoria, Caffeine Withdrawal, Other, Prostitution, Sleep Deprivation, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 19:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7187888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad things come in threes.</p><p>(Set some time before <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4357628">Equals and Opposites</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jitters

**Author's Note:**

> Please excuse William's treatment of Grell. Also ew, look, 11 months and suddenly this version of Will shows up again, what do.

He's out of coffee. That's the first problem. Admittedly by _out_ he means that there's none on his desk right at this very moment – he knows that there is plenty in the break room, but the break room feels a _long_ way away right now so he's out.

William requires coffee to function correctly on the early morning shift. It's currently three pm, but he hasn't slept for almost seventy two hours so it has felt like morning for quite a while. A few times people have seemed to hand him paperwork twice, which has been confusing until he realises each time that one afternoon has bled into the next. It's not that he hasn't been going home; he has, but always late. He needs to finish everything before he leaves each day, but spending most of the morning unable to focus tends to throw his quota off-balance.

He taps his fingers against his thigh. He taps them against the desk, then makes the conscious decision to stop only to find himself drumming dots into the paperwork that he's supposed to be completing. Back to the flesh, then. Three fingers, beats of three, because old habits die hard, old habits die hard, old habits die hard. The coffee habit is accepted in polite society. The alcohol habit he keeps quietly at home, because it's not really anybody's business but his. The two do not play well together; he drinks and then he drinks in an attempt to subdue the effects of one or the other, and then usually he throws up. This also has not been helping his sleep pattern.

Does he really want more coffee? Well, no. What he _wants_ to do is bury his face in some understanding stranger's cleavage, but unfortunately his superiors are going through a phase of “straightening the department out” and would not take kindly to that. He imagines that they would also not take kindly to knowing that his urges (and that's all they are; urges, same as every other man here has) don't stem from the same anatomical configuration as the rest of them bear. But that's also none of their business.

There has been a management-wide ban on visiting ladies of the night, which William doesn't believe will stand for more than another month because – as far as he knows – exactly three members of management have stable, long-term relationships on the go, and none of them practice fidelity. Still the ban is in place _now_ , and has been for exactly three days too long, and William is _suffering_.

Perhaps he's being a tad melodramatic. But that's okay, because there's nobody in his head to hear him and suspect him of anything. Nobody suspects anything. Nobody ever will. The only people to know are the medical staff who check in about once every three years, just to ensure that nothing is going horribly wrong, and the mortal whores whose company he needs every now and again to feel settled. And he is careful with them – ensures that the encounters take place under enough darkness that he's not identifiable, and remembers their names so as to be the one who reaps their souls, when their times eventually come, himself. They are paid to be kind and terribly yielding, and so far none of the have expressed revulsion at what he is. They are beautiful and soft and feminine, even with their unfortunate situations and their dragging collar of past mistreatments, and he needs them in order to remember himself.

Alcohol is a sorry substitute, but it helps him mellow and time pass more quickly than it would otherwise. It also soothes the jitters if he accidentally happens to have hit his caffeine limit. He just has to be careful not to partake in it whilst in the company of others; reputation aside it makes his mind and tongue wander, and although that makes him more likely to simply be more rude than usual rather than to let anything particularly damning slip, his reactions tend to become a little slower and inebriation makes some of his colleagues' hands wander more directly than usual. One of his colleagues, at least.

Grell's been eyeing him again recently. It's unpleasant; makes his skin crawl. The man is too forward, too aggressive in his flirtations – too certain that William can be convinced if the right words are said or the right touch is given. She- _he_ , Grell Sutcliff is a man, no matter how much he simpers and swoons and bats his eyelashes and preens himself he's a man, no matter who he convinces otherwise it remains so. Grell is a man and unfortunately views William as being one of the few others who are ' _man enough_ ' to catch his fancy in full, a fact which William considers to be incredibly ironic and remarkably annoying. Mostly Grell can manage to hold an infatuation for a few months, a year or two – he hawked after one man in Spectacles for almost a decade, but that was an outlying occurrence and he forgot about him after they spent a night together. Grell's infatuations die horrible deaths fast after their loud and lauded births, usually.

It has been almost nine decades and Grell shows absolutely no sign of laying off William. 

It's disgusting, less due to Grell himself and more due to the fact that a blind man would be able to see that it's a very broken, masochistic form of limerence. William has never _enjoyed_ hitting Grell, but is more than willing to resort to remorseless violence if and when Grell drives him to it. If he has to break every one of Grell's fingers to get the man's hands off him, so be it. If she – he, if he were to fail to file charges after an incident like that William would finally be certain that Grell has no sense of self-preservation at all. Unfortunately self-preservation is not an attribute that can be beaten into people.

It's the fact that he always comes back that really bothers William. Other people don't do that – everyone else stands being hit once, maybe twice if they're particularly bad at reading his moods, but after that they steer well clear, because they know to equate certain little tics with approaching violence and make themselves scarce. Grell lets himself be slapped, swiped with the blunt edge of a scythe, kicked, generally beaten – over and over again. He whines about it sometimes, especially if his face bruises or he loses hair, but makes no attempt to stop it from happening. William finds it hard to feel guilty about taking actions that could so easily be avoided by simply toning down. It's a little easier to feel guilty an hour or two later, when the peaked anger has subsided and her face is beginning to show the tender blooms of the bruising. It's never covered, even if the rest of Grell's face is white with makeup. He never ties his hair back to avoid it being pulled.

Grell's hair is _really_ pretty, which is not an opinion William has held about anyone's hair ever before. The thought doesn't mean anything, though, because over the years he has cultivated a careful list of things that are attractive about women and a) nice hair, even if it is breaking a metre in length and is the finest shade of crimson that he's ever seen, has never factored on there and b) Grell has not a single female asset about his body. Oh, maybe his eyes look nice, maybe William enjoys the way his voice lilts _sometimes_ , but the be all and end all is the simple biological reality. Grell Sutcliff is a man, and William is really _incredibly_ sapphic, and thus couldn't be attracted to Grell even if he wanted to be. The idea of bedding Grell repels him. The knowledge that if he has to keep up chastity for much longer he might do it anyway also repels him.

Grell sometimes brings him coffee. Never here when he's needed and omnipresent when unwanted, but the fact remains: coffee might appear near enough spontaneously if Grell somehow senses that William needs it. Maybe if he concentrates hard...

William can't concentrate on anything right now with any particular intensity. His deprivation of sleep and caffeine both ensure that. It's regrettable. A lot of things seem regrettable to William, but he can't see a way to break their roundabout cycle. There are things that he should have done, things that he shouldn't and things that he still isn't sure about, a backlog of messy mistakes that nobody else seems to have noticed yet – and hopefully won't ever – that have landed him this nice, gentle desk job, the dependence on caffeine and liquor, and subordinates who hate him.

The scars on his chest ache at night. The scars on his belly don't. He tries not to think of the connotations of words like _barren_ and _gutted_ and _mutilated_ too often; tries to pretend that he's never seen pity on the face of someone whose service he has bought. He wishes that there weren't mornings where he wakes up feeling disjointed and wrong without knowing why until he looks down and remembers; finds scars corroding what was once a beautiful body. Wishing makes no difference whatsoever, though, and it's not as though he would have made a different decision even had he known it would feel like this.

It's not fair, but that's a child's excuse. 

Grell swans in a little later – too much later. Too late. William hears the heels click, click, click like predatory claws against his floor, feels the air move as Grell crouches at his side, possibly to check if he's awake, and then there's a soft – accidental? - brush against his leg as she stands, a rustle as she moves some of his papers, and a creak as she seats herself on his desk.

She smells like jasmine; the scent isn't strong, but it's certainly there. What she doesn't smell like is coffee, which means that she has failed her single purpose of the day. His mind presents two choices: hit her for this transgression, or pretend that she doesn't exist. Neither of them seem to solve The Problem, so he tries to enlist her help.

“Grell,” he manages, with more coherency than expected. “I need coffee.”

“Do you indeed?” He can hear her smiling. She has a range of different pleased expressions which tend to be weaponised to gain certain reactions from whomever she's aiming it at, but although she sounds amused there's no mockery in her voice. “And what could you possibly offer me in return, hm?”

“I won't have you demoted for insubordination,” he mutters, and she laughs aloud. It's a cascading sound; all of the notes change as her voice shifts pitch. Whether it makes him want to hold her or hit her William doesn't know. It doesn't matter either way – the first option is stupid to consider and there is no third.

“So sure of yourself, love,” she says, and he lifts his head to find her contorted – her head's tilted far to one side, arms looped around her knee. Her smile is bordering on affectionate, which is the last thing he wants to see from her; derision, pity, cruelty or even lust would be easier to deal with, because he could hate her for them. “You were born for this job – or died for it, I suppose. I'll fetch you your fix.”

When he says nothing she gives a huge, theatrical sigh, flicks her hair over her shoulder and hops off the desk before sauntering out. And it is a saunter; Grell moves like a cat, full of that affable nonchalance that betrays a predator.

Once he's gone the room is silent again, although perfume's scent still lingers in the air. William is acutely glad of Grell's absence, both because it signifies the imminent arrival of the coffee and because his presence is stifling. Grell is difficult and basal and horrifically _feminine_ , terribly so, and what's worse is that he is fully aware that he doesn't care for her at all. It's just lust, as crude as she is. He is. He just wants to hear her voice lilt, run his hands down someone's skin. The moment he's sated he'll be smacking her again. Or he would be, were the situation to come to fruition, which it absolutely can't. Because if Grell discovers that he has never been able to give her what she desires, she will talk, and those she tells will talk, and William will be stripped of his position, his autonomy and then probably vivisected.

Grell chooses this moment to wander back in, cradling the cup between her hands as though it it contains the essence of life itself. It may as well do. When she hands it over he finds that she has _diluted_ it with _milk_ – a heinous crime, presumably undertaken in order to rib him for being rude to her – but it is still warm and still coffee, so he forgives her for the transgression as he takes the first grateful draught. It doesn't taste bad. Its surface is the same pale colour as her skin. Grell watches him drink as though either fascinated or worried, and once he's emptied the cup she says, “I don't know that I should be indulging your habit. You're jittery today, lover.”

“I am not your lover.” _God_ but he hates it when she calls him that. All of her endearments are awful and unwanted, but she never heeds the hints. Possibly she believes that she will be able to wear him down if she presses herself against him long enough; possibly she just enjoys his irritation. Possibly she's caught the way he looks at her sometimes and thinks that he's playing some convoluted game. “And I'm just tired.”

“Having trouble sleeping, are we? I know _plenty_ of things that could help you there. Why, I-”

“I don't want to hear it.” Cutting her charade short makes her stop, as though it were entirely unexpected, and for a fraction of a second her face falls.

“Chamomile tea, Will,” she says flatly. “Try drinking that instead of alcohol before bed. Lowering the caffeine intake might help too, but you know that.” Her eyes sweep the desk as though attempting to uncover what has fuelled the distraction of the past few days, but she only picks up the empty cup and begins to leave.

“Grell?” He stares at her and fights down the desperation in his throat, fights down any desire to be grateful or accepting of her. He wants to tell her that she's beautiful, that he wants her here, that there's only one actress in the room and she doesn't wear red. He wants to tell her everything, and watch her hate him for it.

He manages, impotently, “Hurry up and finish your paperwork.”

Grell flashes a grin that lights up her whole face. “Of course I will, darling, seeing as you've asked _so_ politely. You know how I hate to deny you _any_ thing.” She lingers in the doorway for just a moment, long enough for him to catch her last rather hurt glance back at him and a tiny sigh that makes him want to stab himself repeatedly in the midriff with his own scythe. And then she's gone.

William drums his fingertips against his desk, realises what he's doing and stops – almost immediately. But nonetheless the threes return, threes in groups of three, and he goes home late again.


End file.
